Donegal settlers in the Texan Coastal Bend: Historical and Contemporary Archaeologies of the Trans-Atlantic Irish identity
Julie K. Richko
Supervisor: Prof. Tadhg O’Keeffe, Archaeology UCD
Prof. Charles E. Orser, Archaeology ISU
Funded by: 2005-6 Funded by Humanities Institute of Ireland
Abstract
There is a fast-growing accepted understanding for the need and importance of cultural resources, which affect a country’s landscape such as archaeology, history, and tradition. This project explores these themes while focusing on the basic unit of human environment: the home. To expand on this topic, this project explores the social changes that transpired in nineteenth-century Ireland that led to the major out flux of Irish to settle in other countries such as Australia or America. Although Ireland was not a hub of centralized economic and political power as it is today the nineteenth century incites the commencement of the raid social changed which have left their mark on the landscape and can be seen throughout the country presently.
My project is grounded within the tradition of Historical Archaeology, the field of archaeology that is concerned with the recent historic past and with the interrelationships of historical and archaeological records. It is a discipline that is strongly anthropological in nature. Well-established in North America and, increasingly, in Britain, South Africa and Australia, this is a relatively innovative field in Ireland. A series of excavated rural house-cluster sites both in Ireland and in North America will feature prominently. I will continue to work over several seasons on a programme of excavations with Professor Orser in Donegal, Ireland including Derryveagh, an abandoned village site from 47 families were evicted by a local landlord in April 1861. Case-studies from the diaspora include other prominent locusts for migrant rural Irish in the mid- to late 1800s, such as include the Five Points area of New York and the Irish colony of San Patricio, Texas.
My interest in identity will bring me into contact with theories of ethnicity of gender construction and of cultural psychology and selfhood. This project is an ongoing investigation of nineteenth-century Irish ‘at home’ in Ireland and overseas using a theoretically-informed archaeological analysis of its material culture(s) and domestic space(s). The principle guiding my research project is that society is constituted materially and spatially, and that sensitive analysis of any society’s objects and landscapes of habitation, from the household-scale upwards, is necessary if it is to be understood in any holistic sense.